Critical Essay by Carol Wershoven

In the following essay, Wershoven notes that Daisy Buchanan is a prototypical “child bride” whose “purchase” is required by a society of commodity.

Undine Spragg [in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country] is only one in a series of girls whose appetite mirrors a nation's desire. In four novels that followed The Custom of the Country—The Great Gatsby, [Wharton's] Twilight Sleep [and Ellen Glasgow's], The Sheltered Life and In This Our Life—versions of the insatiable girl appear, and so, too, does a recognizable pattern. The desiring/desired girl stands at the center of a vortex. Around her swirl instances of failed marriages, blocked...